Tag: Fairlight Moderns

Travelling in the Dark (2018): Emma Timpany

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★★★

Sarah is making a long overdue journey. With her eight-year-old son beside her, she is on a long-haul flight from her home in London, ‘slipping across countries through the shimmering boundaries of time’, heading back to southern New Zealand where she grew up. As she nears her destination, Sarah must tackle memories from her childhood, recollections of a hard, unfair time that, even now, refuses to loosen its claws completely. Emma Timpany’s evocative but bleak novella, part of the Fairlight Moderns series, probes at the way in which we are yoked to our pasts and follows one woman’s efforts to close the circle: ‘Sometimes it’s just a matter of waiting; waiting for history and memory to align, like stars over a mountain, and lead you home.‘

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The Driveway Has Two Sides (2018): Sara Marchant

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★★★

Time for another Fairlight Modern novella! This time we’re off to a remote island on the east coast of America, to a world of crisp winter winds and pines, and sudden summer influxes of tourists; a world where the year-round residents all know everyone else’s secrets and newcomers are watched with suspicion. And the gossiping islanders have plenty to occupy them now, because an old rental cottage has just been sold to the young and beautiful Delilah. The neighbours wonder about her story (and her morals), gleefully scandalised while Delilah rolls up her sleeves and gets on with the business of transforming her little cottage into a home. But she swiftly realises that she isn’t the only mystery on the island. What about the man who lives in the yellow house next door, with whom she shares a driveway, but who hardly ever comes out into the world?

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There Are Things I Know (2018): Karen B. Golightly

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★★★½

Time for another novella from the Fairlight Moderns series, this time the tale of a little boy named Pepper. He’s eight years old, used to live with his mother in Memphis, Tennessee, and knows that he doesn’t see the world in quite the same way as other people. He dislikes loud noises, finds it difficult to read people’s emotions but finds numbers very easy to tackle: indeed, counting often keeps him calm when the chaos of the world threatens to overwhelm him. Now Pepper lives with Uncle Dan in Arkansas, but he’s having trouble adapting. In fact, he’s beginning to suspect that Uncle Dan isn’t really his uncle at all. But how can one lost little boy get hold of his mother when the only phone number he knows is missing its crucial three-digit area code?

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Inside the Bone Box (2018): Anthony Ferner

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★★★★

In this day and age, with independent bookshops and small publishers closing in swathes, it’s a joy to hear of a newly-founded enterprise: Fairlight Books in Oxford. At one year old, they’re just about to release a series of five novellas in their Fairlight Moderns series and I was delighted to have a sneak peek. I decided to start with Inside the Bone Box, because it focused on a doctor and that appealed in the wake of Adam Kay’s diaries. It’s the story of consultant neurosurgeon Nicholas Anderton, whose burgeoning obesity has already threatened his marriage and now raises very serious questions about his professional capabilities. Meanwhile his wife, Alyson, has her own demons to fight. It soon becomes clear that the ‘bone box’ of the title isn’t just the skull, within which the brain-self resides, but also the prisons we build for ourselves, trapping ourselves within excess flesh or addictions.

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